Performance Estimation for Broadband Multi-Gigabit Millimeter- and Sub-Millimeter-Wave Wireless Communication Links

With the growing interest in high-speed millimeter-wave (mmw) and sub-mmw communication links, detailed studies on the performance limits introduced by nonideal frontend characteristics, e.g., in-phase/quadrature amplitude and phase imbalance, as well as local oscillator phase noise, become indispensable. Only with a detailed insight into the system's behavior, a proper dimensioning and optimization of such wireless links is possible. In this paper we present a performance estimation for broadband wireless links dedicated to multiple tens of Gbit data rate based on known approaches and verify the validity of the estimation by comparison with measurements performed on an E-band wireless frontend. For quadrature phase-shift keying modulated signals and symbol rates of 2 and 5 GBd, the relative error between estimation and measurement is between 1.1 and 2.1%. Furthermore, the estimation approach is used to investigate the performance limiting imperfection of wireless systems operating in the sub-mmw frequency range. Besides the channel noise, the phase noise of the carrier signal is determined as the main limiting factor, especially for systems utilizing extremely broadband modulation bandwidths.